


The Pearl

by Ankaret



Category: Las Meninas (painting by Velázquez)
Genre: F/F, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 00:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one is as close to the Infanta as her maid of honour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pearl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foursweaterests](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foursweaterests/gifts).



_Margarita_ means pearl: an item of price, produced through irritation of her surroundings.

So far this morning the Infanta has lived up to her name by demanding her dwarf, her _other_ dwarf, her dog, a sweetmeat, the silver butterflies out of her attendant Maria Agustina's hair, and a drink of spiced wine, which she now decides that she does not want after all.

Margarita is five years old, and the single shuddering thread on which the future of the crown depends. There may be more infantas, and, please God, a Prince of Asturias and Portugal to inherit his sallow, disappointed father's throne: hope has not yet been extinguished: but for now, the future of the Habsburgs rests in Margarita's round decided cheeks and puggish mouth, and in the hopeful futurity shaped by the circumference of her farthingale. She looks, Maria Agustina thinks, like a girl dressed up as a family tree.

And right now, she doesn't want a drink. She pokes her lower lip out mulishly.

"I don't want you," she says to Maria Agustina, using the familiar _you_ and ignoring any question of titles, as only someone who sits right at the top of the gilded, shadowy edifice of precedence and procedure can. The Alcázar Palace is filled with wood-panelling and mirrors and altars to the saints, but most of all it is filled with protocol, spreading through the corridors like unseen smoke. "I want Velasco."

On her other side, Doña Isabel de Velasco curtseys, but by now Margarita has decided she wants the drink after all, and isn't looking.

The Queen's chamberlain hovers in the doorway, trapped in his own unsureness as to whether the royal child said Velasco or Velázquez. There _is_ a tutor who is supposed to be correcting Margarita's slight lisp, but Margarita has an unfortunate horror of him, and he mostly spends his time waiting about in draughty antechambers, along with messengers from actresses whom the King finds himself now too pious to know, and the envoy from the exiled and impecunious King of England, and other unwanted persons.

Even if Margarita _had_ said Velázquez, she might still have meant the _palace_ chamberlain, Velázquez the painter, who stands at his easel in an attitude of good-humoured patience.

It is a shocking thing, to be sure, to confuse an official of the Queen's household with an officer of the Palace, particularly when one is the Keeper of the Royal Tapestry Works and the other a mere craftsman who might at any moment be called upon to design sets for the Queen's New Year masque or touch up a mural, but there it is: the Infanta lisps, and has at present a fine aristocratic disregard for rank and title, and until her mother presents the waiting world with a son, her whims must not be questioned.

Maria Agustina is just about old enough to remember Margarita's half-brother, the Prince Baltasar Carlos, who died at sixteen. She thinks about him, and then conjures up in her head another possible prince, a full-brother for Margarita, a scrunched-up, red-faced baby wrapped up in enough lace to buy Granada.

Margarita snatches the cup. The light – so important to one Velázquez, and so entirely indifferent to the other, unless it should by its fading cause a demand for new tapestries – falls on her flaxen hair.

Maria Agustina feels her heart turn over, and she doesn't know why. She only has a feeling of distant worry, and even more distant grief.

\--

 _Margarita_ means pearl: a thing snatched from everything that has nourished it, pierced through all its layers and strung together with others of its kind.

Margarita is weeping on the bed. She must have come straight from the rehearsals for the masque, and sent her waiting-women packing when they tried to soothe her: the costume she is wearing is outlandishly straight-up-and-down, with a white undertunic and a fur-trimmed fantastical red-and-gold garment wondrously slashed and filleted to show the lining. A headdress with feathers lies flung to the floor beside the bed.

She is fifteen, and she is weeping as if the world will end. The bed is dour, small, upright, meanly made: its bright hangings make it look like a poor widow dressed up as a cardinal. It shakes with her sobs. One of her lapdogs is sniffing the bonnet. Maria Agustina picks up the bonnet and slaps the feathers back into shape and sets it down on the dresser, and then picks up the dog, too, and puts it out of the door.

She closes the door behind her. It is a breach of protocol, but Margarita never cares: and Maria Agustina, shy but practical, finds herself covered by Margarita's magnificent daring as if by a cloak. Let the door be closed, then. It has been closed before.

Maria Agustina sits on the bed. She strokes Margarita's shoulder, and then her froth of blonde hair.

"Your father was ill for a long time," she says straightforwardly. "He was tired. He has gone to be with God."

Margarita sits up and shoves the hair out of her eyes. The whole puffed edifice of her hair has fallen lopsided like a cake left out in the sun. She was wearing a pair of golden ornaments in the shape of doves with garnet eyes; now one of them is pushed back past her temple, and the other is dangling in a curl on her breast. "Everyone at court has been saying that to me for months," she says savagely.

"Because it's true, my lady."

"Do you know what else is true?" Margarita's eyes are puffy from crying. Her face has lost its baby roundness, and has not, so far, found its way to beauty – her nose and chin are too heavy, and she is too thin – but she has lovely, slanted tea-brown eyes, and a painter's pattern of a mouth. "They say I must marry my uncle Leopold."

Maria Agustina pours some wine, from the golden jug on the silver tray on the table. The jug is reflected in the polished dark wood, and she finds herself thinking about what Velázquez the painter might have done with this scene, had he lived.

Though, of course, such a thing would never be possible. The only people allowed to depict royalty behaving as if they were persons in possession of bodies and emotions are the makers of scurrilous woodcuts. Maria Agustina saw one once: someone pushed it under her door, on a cold day when there was shouting in the streets.

She burned it in the fire, but she has thought about it at odd times ever since. A courtier who might assist the King to his stool every morning can only see a portrait of that King looking handsome and statesmanlike, and probably taller than he ever truly was: but any labourer in the street can stare through a window at a woodcut of the Queen taking a bath. The world is full of paradoxes.

One of those paradoxes is staring Maria Agustina combatively in the face, and snapping her fingers imperiously for a handkerchief. Maria Agustina finds one, a tinsel thing trimmed with silver lace, and hands it over, into Margarita's strong stubby-fingered hand.

For this paradox is the truth: Margarita, who is born of a family second only to God, has no choice at all in whom she will marry, and whose children she will bear, and all the gold plate and brocaded velvet bed-hangings and masques on the theme of Liberty in the world will not change what is so.

"You have been betrothed to your uncle for years, my lady," Maria Agustina ventures.

The tilt of Margarita's rather heavy Habsburg nose, and the noise she makes into her handkerchief, suggests that now is not a good time to tell the Infanta things that she already knows. Maria Agustina does it anyway. "Your mother married your father, who was _her_ uncle, and she was… well, as happy as could be expected."

"She outlived those ministers of my father who tried to send her to a nunnery, and she never let herself know about the actresses, you mean," says Margarita sharply. She glares at Maria Agustina, as if it's all Maria Agustina's fault, and then crumples into her arms and weeps.

The ridiculous stage-costume crackles and presses against the very proper, entirely Spanish boiled wool and starched linen of Maria Agustina's dress, but even through all of that and a busk that might as well have been made of wrought iron, she can feel the unsteady pressure of Margarita's body. She pats the Infanta's shoulder.

After a while, Margarita sits up and glares at her again.

Maria Agustina finds the pressure in her heart lessened, because this is a _different_ glare, one that she finds familiar. This is Margarita determined to take a situation and wrest what she can take from it.

"No one can possibly expect me to call him Leopold in bed," she says, as proudly as if she were kneeling to kiss the hand of the Pope himself. "I demand that much. I shall continue to call him Uncle."

\--

 _Margarita_ means pearl: a precious stone which needs no cutting and polishing to show its beauty, and in some writings, a type or image of the City of God.

Maria Agustina walks with her husband, who is her cousin, and a thing of no more interest to her than a wooden broomstick, into the cathedral to hear the prayers said for Margarita's immortal soul.

Inside, it is cool and shadowy, and smells of incense and unwashed priests. Maria Agustina reaches for her pomander. Her husband says something to her which she does not regard, and goes off to talk to the colonel of his regiment.

"Dead at twenty-one years old," says Isabel de Velasco, who has married very well, and has a hopeful son dressed in lace and ruffles with a miniature sword at his side, and a brace of daughters howling in the arms of a nurse. She is dressed more finely than Maria Agustina, with a soft sweeping bulk of petticoats under her dark skirts rather than an old-fashioned farthingale. She shakes her head. "I understand one daughter survived her, at least. One little archduchess."

"I understand so," says Maria Agustina in a voice that sounds as if it has been starched.

"She was so wilful." Velasco shakes her head sorrowfully, and carries on talking about her own doctor's infallible prescriptions for a safe pregnancy and confinement, which Maria Agustina does not listen to. "I wonder who will inherit that great diamond, the one she had as a wedding gift? The daughter, or Leopold's next wife – lucky girl – "

Maria Agustina looks up, past the altar and its frowsty cloth and tableware, at the light falling through the windows beyond.

 _I served her_ , she thinks, and _I loved her_ , and the two are one and the same.

She closes a door, in her mind, on the things she will never tell her husband or Velasco or anyone else, and goes and lights a candle for that turbulent soul who is now, no doubt, laying down the law with a fine lack of regard for protocol to the archangels of God.


End file.
